This paper is about concerns that project management researchers might need to have when doing research or disseminating results from their research. It has relevance to this journal, others and to those involved in the publication process of conference proceedings. It provides guidance on how to approach research being undertaken as well as disseminating research results. In many countries now, universities have an ethics process for approving research to be undertaken by staff and students undertaking higher degrees. It is hoped that this paper will not only provide guidance to academic researchers but to also spark debate and future research notes. On the theme There is no way that any writer can do justice to all publications and activities on ethical aspects relevant for doing and disseminating management research. At that the issues involved almost always receive a very abstract treatment in the literature beyond comprehension for many of us unless we are willing to spend a lot of energy to make out the meaning of what is said or written. The activities of research ethics involved in making an overview even more complicated. This paper is considerably less ambitious and relatively straightforward, based on experiences and on reflections on the causes and effects of ethical concerns and how they can be handled, but still aspiring to allude to some of the main issues involved. Next, two personal incidences which have colored some of my views on these matters. Personal experiences from doing and disseminating management research Ethical concerns can be quite subtle at times as the following case of personal experience will demonstrate. Once I was involved in a study of transforming a major family firm in the construction business (Lundin and Wirdenius, 1989). My partner in the endeavor was a senior researcher with lots of experience from that industry, making it easy for us to make out what was going on. The firm had been seriously in the red for a few years and the owners had made up their minds to transform it to a modern construction company run with a new, professional CEO, externally hired. The first task for the CEO was to find (or rather invent) a strategy to get the company back into the black. The research was about the strategic steps taken and the responses received in the market and internally within the firm. The new CEO, NN, had indeed a sharp intellect with an impressive track record from the industry and he was very good at analyzing systematically the difficulties that the firm had. He was also very professional concentrating on the tough issues lying ahead leaving no room for small talk when communicating with people in person-to-person. In particular, I recall his intensive, blue eyes virtually X-raying you when you talked to him. At one instance when I interviewed him about actions taken and in the midst of asking him a question I looked into his penetrating eyes and all of a sudden the thought came to me "This question is a stupid one!". Even though I am very used to interview also difficult persons he made me feel small, doubting my own judgement. Furthermore, it was obvious from the interviews made with the entire leadership level of the firm that many had the same impression. The message received was that his personality did not fit in well with the general, cozy atmosphere of the traditional family firm. And the actions taken by him were more often than not met with suspicion and resistance. We found that fact so important that we wrote a piece of text on strategy as related to this matter. He read the text and came back for a discussion with us. I will never forget his opening statement: "You have made a study of me, not of the strategy of the firm! I cannot even show this to my wife!" Initially he was quite upset. From the discussion that ensued it was clear that he was unaware of the effect his personality and stance had on people in his direct environment. He was unable to see himself with the eyes of others, but our text made him aware! Our instant thought at the time was that the experience was potentially damaging to him as a person. Even though the matter obviously was very sensitive to him, we worked through the text together looking for words or expressions that might exaggerate the matter. Two or three words were changed and the final outcome was that we were eventually able to publish essentially the same text (with NNs consent) as part of the book about the case. For us this illustrates that many persons might be unable to see themselves with the eyes of others. And one can always ask oneself when and how such wake-up calls can be made considering the potential damage they might have to the individual. To complete the story of the company, the strategic effort was aborted one year later or so. NN, the CEO, was ousted and at the same time, the company was transformed to be something else than a construction company. In the effort just described, we as researchers were to blame for how we handled the potentially damaging ethical dilemma. The other case is about dissemination and publishing. One year after I had founded what is now Scandinavian Journal of Management, a paper was submitted to the journal. I found it to be an interesting manuscript with a good potential, so it was sent out for a double-blind review to three different reviewers. The reviews were quite favorable, but eventually the decision was "major revision". It took me a couple of days to give feedback and appropriate guidelines to the author. In due time a rewritten manuscript was sent back by the author and distributed by me to the same group of reviewers. This time they were all fairly happy with the manuscript, and so was I with the exception of some minor matters needing attention. The editorial decision was "accepted after minor corrections". After a couple of weeks I received a message that the author had decided to withdraw the manuscript. I found out later that the manuscript had been submitted to another (at the time considered to be a better) journal. I do not know whether the manuscript was eventually published or not but I felt very disappointed with the author since myself and the three reviewers together spent significantly more than one week of work on it without getting the benefit of publishing. Anyway, I disliked the behavior labeling it unethical and the incident colored my impression of the author for quite some time. These two examples serve the purpose to illustrate that guidelines based on personal experiences get integrated into your own personality in a sense. Referring merely to abstract accounts of what to watch out for makes values less apt to be internalized for researchers in their research role as well as in their dissemination role. Nevertheless, there is a need to cover more ground over and above personal experiences since these are limited. How do personal experiences relate to guidelines in the field? Are guidelines always unequivocal? And what can be said in general? Ethical considerations in doing research is next. Guidelines for ethical behavior in doing research Some principles or guidelines are virtually self-evident. "Thou shall never fabricate or falsify research results" is something that most would find unquestionably true and agree on. Nevertheless, it happens every now and then that researchers are caught doing it. From public debates and reports in media, it appears that this happens most often in medicine, but the reason for that might be that the system for detecting such things in medicine are well developed and cases get public due to media coverage of misconduct with potential damage to patients. Personally, I have never even heard of a management researcher caught in the act of falsification. Since management researchers use other methodologies the reason for that might not be that falsification does not occur in management research but simply that it is much more difficult to detect. Alternatively, if instances are detected, the issues do not find their ways to newspaper headlines. Case research results are virtually impossible to check with the data available from the case itself, especially if you are an outsider or if the case is written up in a disguised way. Most research funding institutions do have ethical guidelines for the research done with financial resources from the institution. To take one example from which I have personal board experience the Swedish Research Council has a host of guidelines and ethical considerations spelled out in writing. Many not to say most guidelines are for medical research but a substantial part is also about social science research for research involving humans, companies, etc. All those guidelines are available on the council web site. In particular, one might notice safeguarding against disclosing things about actors involved. Especially matters that actors consider to be personal secrets should remain so. However, if such data is collected it is not possible for the researcher to guarantee that no one else can have access to that data. In a fairly recent case in Sweden, the researcher had guaranteed anonymity to the research subjects, but since the research results were contested he was ordered by the court to make the data collected accessible to scrutinizers. This was never done, though, but the data files were destroyed. Two completely different ethical aspects were in opposition to each other, and the case stirred a lot of debate among researchers and politicians. Research on companies might be sensitive due to competition in the market, for customers, for resources, etc. Disclosing company secrets and thus threatening the core of company existence might lead to a situation where the researcher (or his university) might be brought to the court. One safeguard that many researchers applies nowadays is to let company officials read the text before it is published and thus provide a written permission for publishing the material. The guidelines of the research council also include the need for a committee to check the research plans. For most projects involving humans the researcher has to ask for and get a formal permission from a special ethics committee to do the research. This provides a practice dimension of the question on how to handle ethical issues. Ethical practices are developed sequentially through this formal procedure. In addition to the ethical guideline on not disclosing company secrets there is also in the interest of the researcher not to jeopardize access to research objects by disclosing things that might hurt the company and thereby closing doors of access to research objects in the future. This far the willingness of Swedish companies to involve in and contribute to various types of research is extremely high by international standards giving us a comparative advantage. Anyone who contributes to make companies hesitant will certainly not be admired by others who might face difficulties in getting access due to less than careful behavior. For a journalist, the intention is usually to disclose company/managerial wrongdoing. This is not a researcher task! A researcher should always be open concerning the intentions of the research and how results are to be treated. Some researchers might face a personal dilemma, though. How to behave if you come across unlawful behaviors in a company? One common way to avoid disclosing secrets about a company involved in case research is to distort some facts about the company so that no one reading the study can find out which the company in fact is. However, this is more difficult to do as compared to say. Case studies are always scrutinized extra by readers who are trying to get a clue about the name of the company and it is in practice very difficult for the researcher not to disclose to people in the vicinity the name of the company. Anyway, there are many potential leaks. The frequently use to present cases as anonymous leads to a difficult balancing act of another kind, where the dangers lye in distorting the case so much that it becomes impossible to draw anywhere reliable conclusions or conclusions at all from the case study.\

Guidelines for disseminating For some people it is regarded as unethical NOT to disseminate certain research results. This is when important results for some reason are withheld from the general public even though it is in the general interest to spread the information. This is a fairly uncommon dilemma for most of us. Instead the concern is how to go about publishing. Conference organizers and journal editors can be expected to hate parallel submissions to different conferences or to different journals. Parallel submission to different journals are for certain regarded as inappropriate by all editors I know of. However, if the paper is rejected by the editor the field is open for submission to another journal and the author(s) should feel free to utilize the feedback received from the first submission to rewrite before the paper is submitted to another journal. Parallel submission of the same paper to two different conferences in my view is only admissible if that information is included in the message to the organizers. The reason why the rules might be different for conferences and journals is the time dimension and the efforts involved. Owing to conference schedules the next chance might be next year or even two years later. For many conferences nowadays, the rule or the requirement is that the paper can be submitted only to "my" conference. The rules are not so simple and straightforward as they sound since papers can be classified as same, as similar or as different. And that classification is related to data upon which the paper builds. "Same" to me means that the two papers are exactly the same, more or less word for word. "Similar" is when they build on the same data set, but use different words to make essentially the same points in both papers. Some people hold the view that one set of data can only be used for one paper, but in my own view papers using the same data can be different depending on the way the material has been analyzed of on the theoretical perspective applied. This means that "different" might be totally different or "different" in the sense that the theoretical framework within which data is analyzed changes. In total the points can be summarized as: . Never submit a paper to more than one journal without notifying the editor! . Never submit similar papers to more than one conference at a time without letting the organizer know! . If two papers build on the same data set they can be submitted in parallel, but let the organizer/editor know! . Be aware of the fact that readers do not necessarily read the text as writers do. The burden is always on the writer. Not only do research funding institutions provide guidelines, but also others. When it comes to management researchers they might find the guidelines from Academy of Management useful. They are labeled Academy of Management Code of Ethics (2003-2010) and are available at www.aomonline.org/aom.asp?ID268&page_ID240. One keyword that keeps coming back in that code of ethics is "responsibility". Ethical questions are always questions and can almost never be transformed to fixed rules. What is special with project research? One difference between studying projects on one hand and organizations in general on the other is inherent in the temporality issue. Projects in general have a limited life time. When done they disappear. However, a project-based organization - like a construction company with a host of projects in its realm - is to be there also after the construction work for the specific project is done. This means that essentially the same guidelines are applicable when it comes to company data. Information that is sensitive for individuals continues to be so also after completion of the project. The same is true for support projects in a project supported organization. Support projects are concerned with the (inner) functioning of the host organization and are to be kept even more secret than projects of a bread and butter type. The host organization is still there when the reorganization task or whatever it is gets done. However, network-based projects might be completely different if the partners in the network disassociate from each other. Then there is in essence no correspondence to company secrets, but concerns about individuals are still the same. What else is special with research on projects and temporary organizations? The publish or perish ideology The publish or perish ideology stems from a definite desire of research administrators and university officials to measure results and evaluate researchers. And researchers have to "buy into" that ideology simply by producing output which is measurable and that can be attributed to the efforts of the researcher. In essence, the publish requirement is quantitative and so is also conference presentation. One is expected to count the number of articles published or papers presented which is simple and cannot be contested. One more dimension of the efforts has appeared during the last decades, though. Journals and conferences are of different quality. Where you publish also makes a difference since some journals are considered to be much more valuable than others. And the same is true about conferences. The result of the pressure on researchers is that it forms a background to the temptation to wrongdoing in research and in publishing. Also, one effect of pursuing only the ambition to go for the best journals or the best conferences is conservatism. The 20 top management research journals are the same today as they were 20 years ago, and the conferences go in the same direction in terms of reputation. "Do not lead the journal or the conference into disrepute!", then becomes the logical guideline for those in responsible positions. The conclusion of all this is that journals and conferences become part of the machinery serving the publish or perish ideology, good research and renewal of research becomes secondary. Or can they be combined? One of my personal favorites among researchers in the Social Sciences is Barbara Czarniawska. She was once asked how she had been able to publish so many books in a limited time and so many articles, etc. Her answer might be a useful guideline for most researchers: "I always study things I do not understand!" A reasonable corollary seems to be that chances are that others do not understand those things either. This might provide you with a good chance to contribute something extraordinary and useful over and above conforming with the traditional publish or perish ideology.

  

2. Review the above article and develop a synthesized discussion on some ethical considerations inherent to conducting qualitative research.
4. How might these considerations be addressed/mitigated?